David French
The Most Important
Question Is ‘What if I’m Wrong?’
Jan. 25, 2026
By David French
Opinion
Columnist
College can help open
your mind or close it. College can push you toward a spirit of curiosity, or it
can reaffirm your pre-existing convictions and confirm your blinkered
worldview.
I don’t want to
overstate what a college can do. It’s not as if college students are mere lumps
of moral and intellectual clay that can be shaped and formed at will by
professors and administrators, or by one another.
Ask a professor, and he
or she is likely to tell you that students usually arrive on campus with strong
pre-existing ideologies and theologies. Students interested in politics, in
particular, often come to campus as committed activists.
Professors, however, still have
influence. I know that I arrived on my college and law school campuses with a
host of fierce convictions. My best professors urged me to question my
assumptions, to test them against the new facts I was learning and to ask
whether new information (and better reasoning) might change my mind.
But that’s not the only
kind of college experience. Many students walk into college echo chambers, and
very little about their education causes them to question their beliefs, much
less change their minds. Instead of gaining humility, they increase their
pride. And this arrogance and sense of certainty have contributed immeasurably
to our national enmity and polarization.
The story of the University of Austin gives us a glimpse of both
the problem and the solution. New institutions can be an answer to the failures
of the old, but they’re still subject to the same temptations and can easily
slide into the same mistakes.
The University of
Austin, or UATX, was launched with much fanfare in 2021. The goal was to create a new
highly selective university that would be free of the maladies and pathologies
that plagued so many legacy universities.
The founders of the new
university included Niall Ferguson, a leading historian; Bari Weiss, formerly
of The Times, the founder of The Free Press, and the current head of CBS News;
and Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire co-founder of Palantir Technologies.
It would be a mistake to describe the
new university as merely a right-wing institution. Among its early advisers
were Nadine Strossen, a former president of the American Civil Liberties Union,
and famous centrist academics such as Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt.
Indeed, if you peruse
the entire list of
early founders and advisers, the word you’d use to describe the vast majority
of them isn’t necessarily “right-wing” or “left-wing” but rather “liberal,” in
the classical definition of the term — committed to free expression, the rule
of law and open inquiry.
Their very presence on
the list of UATX’s early founders and advisers was an indictment of elite
legacy institutions, all too many of which had become deeply illiberal as a
matter of policy and of culture.
So much has happened
over the past year that it’s easy to forget the persistent problems of the
American academy. For example, a majority of students in
a national survey reported feeling intimidated about voicing their true
opinions on hot-button political topics.
I can understand why. I
teach at a college. I speak at many colleges across the country. And when I ask
students why they don’t speak up more, or why they don’t debate their peers in
class, I hear the same reason again and again: They don’t want to lose friends.
They don’t want to risk their grades.
And these aren’t the fears of closet
Klansmen but rather of people who hold thoughtful, mainstream positions that
differ from the progressive orthodoxy on campus.
If ideological orthodoxy
were enforced only through peer pressure, that would be troublesome enough. But
campus illiberalism long ago moved far beyond social pressure and into the
realm of university policy.
Speech codes and bias response teams have
chilled speech on many campuses. Some universities have required job applicants to
articulate their views on diversity, equity and inclusion — in effect creating
formal ideological litmus tests for hiring and promotion.
Why did so many
classical liberals from the right and left join UATX? Because campus
illiberalism requires a response, and one of the best and most productive forms
of response is to build new and better institutions, to offer students a
choice.
But Steven Pinker is no
longer affiliated with UATX. Neither, reportedly, is Jonathan Haidt or Nadine
Strossen. Nor are many others among the leading liberal writers and thinkers
from the left or right. By the end of last summer, close to half the original
cohort of prominent supporters had parted ways with the school.
Earlier this month, Politico Magazine published a long and fascinating account of
the divisions at UATX, by Evan Mandery, a professor at the John Jay College of
Criminal Justice.
As Mandery writes, a key
moment occurred on April 2, 2025, when professors and staff gathered to hear
from Lonsdale, a member of the board. According to the writer and academic
Michael Lind, who was a visiting professor at the time, Lonsdale told the gathering
that every member of the faculty and staff had to subscribe to four principles
— anticommunism, antisocialism, opposition to identity politics and
anti-Islamism.
Defenders of the
university labeled Mandery’s article a “hit piece”; Lonsdale himself doubled down. “If you’re on a university board and are
not attacked for purging commies,” he posted on X, “or making sure
commie-adjacent bureaucrats don’t screw up your institution, then you’re not
doing your job.”
To be clear, in
right-wing America, the word “commie” does not refer exclusively to actual
communists (of whom there are very few in the American academy) but often to
the whole kaleidoscope of American progressivism. Ideas or people whom
populists don’t like constantly find themselves labeled socialist, communist or
Marxist — at least when the term “woke” is deemed insufficiently derisive.
In other words,
according to Mandery’s account, UATX wasn’t creating a true alternative to
legacy elite institutions but rather their mirror image — a place that imposes
its own ideological boundaries and that is proving inhospitable to dissenting
voices. Rather than answering illiberalism with liberalism, it was threatening
to respond in kind.
The story of UATX isn’t yet written.
The college is new, and there are still a number of outstanding individuals on
the faculty and in leadership, but the red flags are flying. The school may
already be at a crossroads.
The longer our nation slogs through this terrible political moment, the
more I’m convinced that the real national conflict isn’t between left and right
— it’s between liberal and illiberal, decent and indecent.
And that brings us back
to the clash between curiosity and conviction. I like to tell people that in
the course of my education I attended two religious institutions — Lipscomb
University, a Christian college in Nashville (where I teach classes today), and
Harvard Law School, an ostensibly secular and diverse professional school.
But when I was at
Harvard in the early 1990s, it felt more like an ideological boot camp than
Lipscomb had. The vast majority of my professors were of one mind. So were the
vast majority of my peers. Although there were certainly liberal-minded
students and professors, much of my education felt like training for activism
more than inquiry.
This spirit of activism
wasn’t new. It had developed steadily after the tumult of the 1960s, and by the
1980s it was bearing bitter fruit in the form of the university speech code.
After all, what value is free speech if you’ve figured out the most important
answers to the most important questions in life? How can we implement our
vision of social justice if we’re divided by dissent?
Over time, this mind-set results in
a startling ideological
monoculture, in which almost everyone around you is broadly in your
ideological camp. When almost every smart person you know agrees with you to
some important degree, then it’s very easy to slide to the conclusion that your
opponents aren’t just wrong but potentially even stupid or evil.
And who wants stupid or
evil people on campus?
The best colleges, by
contrast, take the opposite approach. They don’t teach you to double down on
your convictions but rather to approach the world with a spirit of curiosity.
It’s not that curious people shouldn’t have convictions; but their convictions
should be tempered by humility.
I’m an imperfect person.
I don’t know everything. I will never know everything. Therefore, I should
approach the world with an open heart and an open mind.
In an institution
committed to cultivating curiosity, speech codes are anathema. The last thing
it wants to do is to stifle discussion.
This type of institution
isn’t trying to train and mobilize young ideological shock troops, cannon
fodder in the culture wars. Instead, it uses its influence to cultivate people
who will remain curious their entire lives.
The preservation of our Republic
requires us to be double-minded. We have to respond to the emergency of the
moment — whether we’re facing threats against a NATO ally or systematic
constitutional violations in the streets of Minneapolis — and, at the same
time, rethink and rebuild the institutions that put us in this terrible place.
And that means using
whatever influence that colleges do have to introduce a single important
thought into even the most ideologically and religiously committed young minds:
What if I’m wrong?
It is that recognition that can change
a life. It is that recognition that can open a heart. And it’s that recognition
that allows us to turn to a friend, a neighbor and even an ideological opponent
and sincerely ask one of the most important questions you can ask — what
do you think?
